One aspect relates to a method for producing an alloy, whereby the alloy consists of a first metal, a second metal, a third metal, and a fourth metal, and the first metal, the second metal, the third metal, and the fourth metal are selected from the group consisting of the metals, niobium, zirconium, tantalum, and tungsten.
In medical technology, wires and tubes are needed for the production of medical components. Said wires and tubes are made, for example, of alloys of multiple high-melting metals. In “Journal of the mechanical behavior of biomedical materials I,” (2008), p. 303-312, a method for producing an alloy from the metals, niobium, zirconium, tantalum, and tungsten—which shall be referred to as NbTaWZr hereinafter for simplicity reasons—is described. In the scope of said method, the four metals are each ground to form a powder and then melted. Despite the individual metals being ground first, it has proven to be a disadvantage of said method that individual inclusions may arise in which only one element of the four metals specified above is present.
In production methods, which are also known, rods made of pure metals are bundled and melted in a high vacuum, for example, by means of an electron beam. It has proven to be disadvantageous in the case of alloys made of tantalum, niobium, zirconium, and tungsten, that the element with the highest melting point is melted only incompletely. To some extent, larger lumps, for example, of tungsten, drop into the melt bath during the melting process without mixing with the other components of the alloy. Referred to as inclusions or mono-elemental regions, such non-melted lumps of one of the alloy metals lead to failure of the material at a later time, when the alloy is drawn into a wire. This can lead to fissures or cavities arising at said inclusions. Moreover, said inclusions render the processing more difficult. For example, the inclusions reduce the fatigue resistance and lead to corrosion of a wire made of the alloy.
For these and other reasons there is a need for the present invention.